Sunday, January 26, 2014

Well it's been forever since I posted much. I have found that blogging is harder than I thought. I have still been posting on TPT if you follow me. We have been busy in the classroom with our winter units. Next week we will begin our Polar Animal unit. I used to call it "Arctic Animals" but then I got a ton of comments that I was technically incorrect- that penguins are not in the Arctic- so I quickly changed everything to "Polar". Oops. Here are some of the new products in my TPT store and some freebies!

I also have a bunch of winter centers that you can pretty much print and go:
This one is a freebie!

I'll try blogging more now. I've really been slacking taking pictures of all the fun things we have been doing in the classroom-so my camera comes back to school with me on Monday.

This next week is kind f an odd week for my theme and things. We are finished with Halloween and pumpkins, but it's too early to start thanksgiving, so we are going to be doing some odds and ends projects. I have a few left over scarecrow projects and fall activities, but I really don't have many creative ideas... anyone out there have anything for me this week?
Here are some things from the past couple of weeks that went well:
Some simple fall décor:

Paint a paper plate orange, add a leaf and stem and you're finished!

This is a simple pumpkin shape project that we made. It's a 5x6" rectangle for the orange pumpkin 2x1" stem and a 2x3" green leaf. I gave them a black strip of paper to make their own face. Some of them were interesting, but I forgot to take a picture before I sent them home with the students.

Leaf wind socks. I just cut construction paper in half long ways for the base. The strips are 1" by about 4" because I'm tall and don't like hitting my head on them all day. There are tons of leaf patterns to color and cut in google images.

This is another shape art project. We read 5 little pumpkins and then acted out the story. We also did a youtube video of the story which the kids loved.

From a couple of weeks ago you can see our Mrs. Wishy Washy bulletin board. We colored and cut out animals, then we added "mud" by mixing brown paint and shaving cream. It dries fluffy like mud and the kids loved it.

Going along with our farm unit a couple of weeks ago we graphed our favorite farm animals. I like to always asks the students "what can you tell me about the graph" and then record what they tell me.

For the letter Pp we made our own pizzas! This is one of my favorite projects. The students each made their own paper plate pizza with their favorite pizza toppings. We then graphed as a class which toppings they liked on their pizza. They loved this project as much as I do, and it's a great bulletin board when you're finished!

With our fall unit we did spider color graphing. Each student has their own graph at their desks and take turns coming up to pick out a spider. You can click the image below to get the worksheet.

this is something from the Mrs. Ricca pack that I posted about earlier.

And this is a super easy center that the students were amazed by. You can print any type of image and then trace over them with puff paint. They will then turn into stencils great for rubbings. We did real rubbings as well with leaves we found outside, but these seem to show up better and the students were amazed.

Thursday, October 31, 2013

So it's been a while, I have found the blogging takes time, and I haven't had a lot of that lately. Mainly because of the Cardinals doing so well. I have been watching every game. Tonight I'm going to catch up some... after a great night of trick-or-treating with an adorable firefighter and monkey:

I've been doing some fun pumpkin activities this week as well.

I found this great free unit from Mrs. Ricca. You can get it at the TPT store-- again it's free!

After we cut open t he pumpkin we did this project with our seeds:

It has some great pumpkin ideas. We have done many of them:

This comes with sequencing cards that the students can put in order. It also come with a small reader that goes through the lifecycle of the pumpkin. We did both of them.

I added this to my dramatic play pocket chart center. I did not include the recording worksheet, my students don't seem ready for that yet. They just match up the color words to the right color of pumpkin. It was a big hit for the students to play "school".

We are doing pumpkin colors for one of our centers. We are also doing some centers from Mrs. Ricca's free pack. I will include some more pictures of them soon.